Point of Sale Review – Revel Systems

   / — Cloud Computing, iPad-point-of-sale, tablet based point of sale

 

 

 

Revel Systems iPad Point of Sale has the most features of any tablet based POS system on the market.  After reviewing the Revel POS demonstrations and videos online we estimate that they are a full 18 months ahead of the other table based point of sale systems on the market.  The fact that Revel Systems has been recognized by Apple and Intuit as a strategic partner means that they are positioned as the leader in tablet based point of sale marketplace.

Demo Videos:

Retail Point of Sale Demo Video:

Revel Systems Quick Service Point of Sale Demo Video:

Revel Systems Table Service Point of Sale Demo Video:

Our team at POS System Review recognizes that there will be consolidation within the tablet based point of sale industry and we believe that Revel is currently positioned as the market leader.

History:

Revel Systems is an award-winning iPad Point of Sale Solution that is headquartered in San Francisco. Revel Systems point of sale was founded byLisa Falzone and Chris Ciabarra.

Revel Systems point of sale was founded in 2010 the Revel team has raised over 130 million in venture capital, and has partnerships with Intuit, and Apple.

POS Network Architecture:

  • Hybrid network architecture achieved through a combination of a LAN and real time data syncing to the cloud
  • Data is transferred from the iPads to the cloud-server over a secure, private, and hidden wireless network
  • Revel is PCI compliant and uses a P2PE encryption.
  • Offline Mode/Always On: allows system to operate without internet connectivity. Take credit card payments even without internet. The only difference with Revel’s offline mode versus online mode is that you will not know if a credit card has declined until you get your internet connection back.

Point of Sale Management Console Feature List:

Point of Sale Reporting:

  • Point of Sale reporting data is fully exportable into JSON, CSV, Excel, PDF formats
  • Revel reports may be filtered by date range down to the minute, their reports can also be filtered by employee, pos station & revenue centers.

Point of sale reports provided:

  • Sales Summary
  • Operations Report
  • Hourly Sales Report
  • Product Mix
  • Order History Report
  • Payment Summary
  • Action Log
  • Cash Office
  • Commission
  • Discounts and Voids
  • Employee Profit
  • Establishment Payments
  • Gift Cards
  • Gift Transactions
  • House Accounts (HA)
  • Ingredient Inventory Log
  • Ingredient Inventory Summary
  • Invoices
  • Labor
  • Payouts / Payins
  • Product Component
  • Product Inventory Log
  • Product Inventory Summary
  • Receiptless Returns
  • Rewards Cards
  • Serial Number
  • Service Fee
  • Speed of Service
  • Tax
  • Tills

Point of Sale Enterprise Management

Revel Point of Sale is one of the few tablet based systems out there with full enterprise level management.  This is why large brands like Cinnabon have selected Revel Systems POS as their point of sale of choice. Revel Systems Point of Sale you have full centralized remote menu control. You also have the ability to push menu updates across multiple establishments, groups of establishments, or all establishments.

POS Product Features

  • Manage menus remotely
  • Create product combos combos
  • Build custom menus
  • Set product classes
  • Discounts may be created per product group/product/class
  • Variable pricing (Buy 2 hot dogs, get 1 at 50% off)
  • Create different tax groups for different products (hot dog is taxed but water is tax-free)

Menu customization:

  • Custom menus can be set by:
    • Time period
    • POS Station
    • Stand number/location
  • Set custom menus/discounts that apply to certain stands, products and times (i.e. Pregame/Early Bird menu in South End Zone)
  • Add new products on the fly
  • Set products as in stock/out of stock (86 feature)
  • System automatically switches to and from custom menu based preset time parameters
  • Product description:
    • Easily input nutrition information, allergies, ingredients for reference, etc.

Point of Sale Menu Combos and Modifier Customization:

  • Create dynamic combo’s and upsell combos
  • Modifier options:
    • Split modifiers (first half/second half)
    • Set modifier quantity
    • Color-coded modifiers
    • Set minimum/maximum modifiers
    • Multiple modifier groups (bun, toppings, meat, veggies, etc.)
    • Enable or disable modifier discounts
    • Allow for modifier ‘substitutions’

 

Inventory

  • Ingredient/Recipe Level Inventory
  • Real-time inventory tracking
  • Real-time low stock alerts
  • Calculated Waste Loss – Revel Point of Sale calculates waste loss variance and percentages automatically, helping your business diminish shrinkage or loss.
  • Warehouse establishment inventory control
  • Vendor tracking – tying products/ingredients to vendors with reorder quantity and price
  • Purchase Order generation
  • Transfer inventory across locations and revenue centers
  • Matrix Inventory (parent & child products) for retail/merchandise items

Employees

  • Create customized roles with permissions for point of sale and point of sale management console use
  • Provide restricted management console access to managers or franchisees
  • Assign wages to employees to fully track payroll and schedule Labor Cost % accurately with wage forecasting tool.  Revel also supports a Paychex / ADP export function.
  • Email schedules to employees directly from management console

Schedules

  • Set Timesheet rules – Overtime rates, workweek start time, time allowed for clock-in before shift, etc.
  • Labor saving features like Auto Clock out are also available
  • Schedule Creation
    • Create employee schedule
    • Email shifts per employee
    • Wage Forecasting
    • Copy shifts from week to week
    • Track employee time worked
    • Set auto-clock out times
    • Limit clock-in before shift start
    • Limit POS access prior to clock-in
  • Time Worked
    • View which employees are clocked in in real time
  • Payroll
    • Choose to view declared tips in payroll

CRM

  • Unlimited data hosting to number of customers and tracking customer orders
  • Customizable Customer groups
  • Customer Order Reports.  This can be very valuable to marketers who are interested in segmenting their email marketing lists by product.

Settings:

The settings that you have applied to your Revel Poiint of Sale will depend on the specific type of business you are running.  Here are just a few of the settings you can choose from.

Receipt Options:

  • Email receipt
  • Print receipt
  • No receipt
  • Reprint receipt
  • Print tip line on receipt
  • Print suggested tips

Payment Options:

  • Cash
  • Credit
  • Debit
  • EBT
  • Check
  • Custom
  • Apple Pay
  • PayPal
  • House Accounts
  • Open tabs
  • Invoicing
  • Link card to order
  • Preauthorization

Tips:

  • Auto-gratuity
  • Track declared tips
  • Prompt for tip on Customer Facing Display
  • Print tip line/tip suggestions on receipts

Discounts:

  • Program discounts only for certain time periods
  • Program discounts only for certain products or product groups
  • Preset discounts and discount reasons
  • Scan discount barcode
  • Manually enter discount code
  • Percentage discounts
  • Dollar amount discounts
  • Order discounts
  • Item discounts
  • Manual discounts
  • Discounts may be taxed or untaxed

Hardware:

Revel Systems point of sale requires specific hardware a full list can be found on the Revel Systems website:

Hardware

Payment Processing:

Revel Systems iPad point of sale is an open platform that allows you to integrate with any payment processor.  Many POS systems make money on the processing.  Revel point of sale is completely neutral when it comes to payment processing this allows you the flexibility to choose the payment processor you would prefer.

Customer Service & Support:

Revel has varying levels of support depending on the need.  They even have a VIP account manager service, that allows you to have a dedicated support manager for your POS system.

Pricing & Contract:

Revel Systems iPad Point of Sale pricing varies depending on the business and vertical. POS pricing typically starts at 119/month for the first terminal.

Web Resources:

Revel Systems Website – http://www.revelsystems..com/

Crunch Base Profile – https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/revel-systems

Verticals Serviced

  • Retail POS
  • Restaurant POS
  • Coffee Shop POS
  • Quick Service POS
  • Bar POS
  • Food Truck POS
  • Boutique POS
  • Bakery POS
  • Cafe POS
  • Liquor Store POS
  • Vape Shop POS
  • Enterprise POS

Leave a Review:

What was your experience with Revel Systems iPad Point of Sale?  Please leave your review on our site to provide our users with your experiences.

Point of Sale Review – Toast

   / — Android point of sale, tablet based point of sale

History

Toast Point of Sale is a mobile point of sale platform based off of the android platform.  Toast was founded on December 22, 2011 and to date they’ve raised just over 30 million dollars in venture capital, most recently from Google Ventures.  Toast POS is an exciting alternative to the iOS tablet based point of sale systems.  Toast POS is based in Boston Toast and is used primarily for restaurants, cafes, bars, nightclubs.
Demo Videos:
Mobile Order Taker:


POS Network Architecture:

Toast Point of Sale uses the Android platform,  with hardware devises not being locked down in the same way as iOS there could be potential security pitfalls of basing a point of sale system on Android.  However time will tell what is truly the most stable and secure platform over time.  The use a hardwired lan connection for all full terminals.  This creates a local area networking that helps facilitate communication between the tablets and the different hardware add ons.

Toast POS primarily uses Cisco Meraki routers and access points of the wireless communication.

POS Software – Management Console

Toast POS has what you would expect from a cloud based tablet solution.  You have the ability to remotely see reports and check in on your restaurant to see up to date labor reports and sales figures.

Hardware:

Like most tablet based point of sale systems, Toast uses industry standard hardware, like Epson printers and honeywell barcode scanners. A full list of compatible hardware can be found on the toast POS website:

https://pos.toasttab.com/android-pos/all-pos-hardware

Payment Processing:

There is currently only one option for payment processing and this requires that you use Toast as a payment processor.  This is a huge negative for the system because it can add significant cost to the system over time.  While the initial investment for this tablet based devise is somewhat lower because of the fact that it is based on Android and not iOS it will be far more costly in the long run because you will be locked into a high and non competitive processing rate.  This is very similar to how many other Point of Sale company’s make money.  It’s important to investigate and take into consideration what processor you will need to use with your point of sale system.

Customer Service & Support:

We believe toast has anywhere from 1000 to 3000 clients currently.  This is certainly not a very large user pool to work with and from what we have heard from existing Toast Clients and post Aloha/Micros users is that the system is good in theory but not yet ready to run a high volume, high transaction nightclub, restaurant, or bar.  And this makes sense because Toast is a fairly new to the scene company in the POS world.  The majority of online reviews we found online were mostly positive but we did not find a large amount of them.  It will be interesting to see how this company develops as they use the newly minted 30 million from Google ventures that was closed recently to scale up their sales, operations, and product development.  As with any start up this kind of capital injection is bound to create growing pains if not managed properly.

Pricing & Contract:

The most common pricing structure for Toast POS starts at 100/month, each additional devise is priced at 50/month. Enterprise accounts require a custom quote to get specific pricing. More details on their specifics can be found on the toast website:

https://pos.toasttab.com/pricing

Web Resources:

Toast POS Website – https://pos.toasttab.com/

Crunch Base Profile – https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/toast#/entity

Leave a Review:

What was your experience with Toast Point of Sale?  Please leave your review on our site to provide our users with your experiences.

 

Point of Sale Review – Touch Bistro

   / — iPad-point-of-sale, tablet based point of sale

History

Touch Bistro POS is an iPad based / tablet based point of sale solutions that was founded in 2011.  Touch Bistro POS was founded and primarily based out of Toronto, Canada.  To date they’ve raised just over 10 million dollars in venture funding.
Demo Videos:

POS Network Architecture:

Touch Bistro requires an onsite server to be able to manage the system.

Customer Service & Support:

Touch Bistro has 365 24/7 support included with their platform.

Pricing & Contract:

Touch Bistro has different pricing depending on how many iPads you will need to run their system on.

  • Single – $69/month for 1 license.
  • Dual – $129/month for 2 licenses.
  • Team – $249/month for up to 5 licenses.
  • Unlimited – $399/month unlimited licenses.

Web Resources:

Touch Bistro Point of Sale Website – http://www.touchbistro.com/

Crunch Base Profile – https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/touchbistro#/entity

Leave a Review:

What was your experience with Touch Bistro Point of Sale?  Please leave your review on our site to provide our users with your experiences.

Point of Sale Review – POS Lavu

   / — iPad-point-of-sale, tablet based point of sale

History

Lavu Point of Sale was founded in 2010 and based Albuquerque, NM in June of 2015 they raised 15 million for their series A round.  Lavu is based on iOS and is considered an iPad or Tablet based point of sale system. The core focus of their product is restaurants and bars.
Demo Videos:

POS Network Architecture:

While POS Lavu is a cloud based system it requires a wireless local area network to operate.  If your restaurant or bar were to loose it’s internet connection there is no way to process credit card transactions or use the system offline without setting up a Mac Mini Server.  If you choose to go with the Mac Mini server option this will cost an additional $149/ month on top of their traditional pricing.  Even with the Mac Mini server in place there is no way to accept credit cards in offline mode.  This means that if you decide to go with Lavu you may want to consider having a back up internet connection and setup a cradle point system with cellular internet connection to ensure you always have internet connection.

Hardware:

Like most tablet based point of sale systems, Lavu POS uses industry standard hardware, like Epson printers. A full list of compatible hardware can be found on the Zephyr Lavu Reseller POS website, as POS LAVU does not keep a full hardware compatibility list on their website:

http://www.zephyrhardware.com/

Payment Processing:

POS Lavu can use a variety of different gateways and merchant service providers. The preferred gateways for POS Lavu are Vantiv, BridgePay, Heartland, Cayan & USAePay.  Alternatively you can use PayPal, however they do not appear to have a true EMV solution that currently integrates with these MSPs or processors.

Customer Service & Support:

Lavu has 365 24/7 support included with their platform.

Pricing & Contract:

The most common pricing structure for Lavu POS starts at 59/month, this is with an annual contract. If you choose to go with a month to month agreement then the subscription is 69/month. Enterprise accounts require a custom quote to get specific pricing. More details on their specifics can be found on the toast website:

https://www.lavu.com/restaurant-pos-pricing

Web Resources:

Lavu Inc. Website – https://www.lavu.com/

Crunch Base Profile – https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/poslavu#/entity

Leave a Review:

What was your experience with Lavu iPad Point of Point of Sale?  Please leave your review on our site to provide our users with your experiences.